See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/312964655

Combined Feature Extraction and Selection in Texture Analysis

Conference Paper · December 2016

DOI: 10.1109/ISCID.2016.1098

CITATIONS READS

12 153

2 authors, including:

Mengmeng Li
Zhengzhou University
46 PUBLICATIONS   145 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Avian Neuroscience Studies View project

Machine Learning & Application in Medical Image Analysis View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Mengmeng Li on 22 September 2021.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Combined Feature Extraction and Selection in Texture Analysis
M. M. Li, Z. G. Shang
School of Electrical Engineering
Zhengzhou University
Zhengzhou, China
e-mail: limengmeng1014@163.com, zhigang_shang@zzu.edu.cn
Abstract—Texture analysis is an important research content in
pattern recognition and computer vision, and we can get
important information from the image through texture
analysis. As an important method of image segmentation,
feature extraction and classification, texture analysis has a
very wide range of applications in the field of scientific
research and engineering technology. In order to solve the
problem of image classification, feature extraction and
selection are combined in texture analysis. Different methods
of texture analysis are used to extract texture features and a
texture feature selection method based on grouped sorting is
proposed in this paper. As in that work, 42 different texture
feature parameters are extracted and efficient less ones are
selected by the proposed method to be used in the classification.
The proposed method is tested in numerical experiments on
the texture database and real tumor data set. The experimental
results suggest that the method is effective.
Keywords- texture analysis; feature extraction; feature
selection; redundancy grouping; dependence sorting
I. INTRODUCTION
The image gray is with certain spatial correlation
properties and the recurring of gray distribution forms the
image texture [1]. That is to say, in the image space, there
exists mutually certain gray level relationship between two
pixels adjacent or apart of a certain distance. Image texture is
the important quantitative feature in image computation. It
can help us to effectively realize the correct classification of
different kinds of images by extracting a series of texture
parameters.
To describe the texture quantitatively, the characteristics
of the texture itself must be studied. For recent years, many
different methods have been proposed to measure the texture
properties and they can be roughly divided into four
categories which are the statistics based method: Gray-Level
Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) [2], [3], Gray-Level Run
Length Matrix(GRLM) [4], Gray-Level Gradient Co-
occurrence Matrix (GGCM) [5], [6], autocorrelation function
method [7]; the signal processing based method (frequency-
spectrum method): Fourier transform method [8], Wavelet
transform method [9], Gabor transform method [10]; the
model based method: Morkov Random Field (MRF) Model
[11], [12], Simultaneous Autoregressive (SAR) model [13]
and the structure based method [14]. Among them, the
statistics based method is undoubtedly the dominant.
Feature extraction and selection are combined in this
paper to solve the texture image processing and classification
problem. Different kinds of texture analysis (TA) methods
are used to extract texture features. Then feature selection is
carried out to obtain efficient texture features based on the
proposed method. In this work, the feature grouping relies on
the redundancy [15] of the features each other and the sorting
is based on the dependence [16] of the class information on
each feature. Numerical experiments on texture database and
real tumor data set are provided to verify the validity of the
proposed method. The results show that the method can
perform well on texture feature extraction and selection and
the classification accuracy after feature selection remains as
high as the original all features model basically.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
introduces the texture analysis method combined feature
extraction and selection. Section 3 presents the materials and
classifiers used in this paper. Section 4 presents the
experiments and simulation results analyses. Finally, the
conclusions and discussion are concluded in Section 5.
II. TEXTURE ANALYSIS COMBINED FEATURE
EXTRACTION AND SELECTION
The proposed method aims at the efficient extraction and
selection of the texture features. So it consists of two stages.
In the first stage, texture parameters are extracted by various
methods, and then we select the efficient ones to be used in
classification in the second stage.
A. Texture Feature Extraction
Feature extraction is the process through which the
texture features are digitized. The texture features extracted
can be used to describe the texture variation, texture
direction and texture roughness. A good feature extraction
method should narrow the feature value difference of
samples within class and increase the feature value
difference of samples between classes as far as possible.
Thus it can help to improve the classification accuracy. In
this paper, six texture feature extraction methods are used
and 42 texture parameters are obtained finally. The details
are shown in Table 1. The following subsections describe
each method.
1) Gray-level Histogram: Gray-level Histogram [17]
represents the gray (intensity) values distribution of the
image, ranging from 0 to 255 (or 0 to 1, in case of
 TABLE I. TEXTURE FEATURE PARAMETERS
TA Method Texture Feature Parameters
Gray-level mean, variance, smoothness, three order
Histogram moments, consistency, entropy
contrast, correlation, entropy, homogenei-
GLCM
ty, energy
run length, run length ratio, short run
GRLM emphasis, long run emphasis, gray level
distribution
small gradient strengths, large gradient
strengths, gray uneven representation,
gradient uneven representation, energy,
GGCM gray mean, gradient mean, gray mean
square, gradient mean square, relevance,
gray entropy, gradient entropy, mixing
entropy, inertia, inverse gap
coarseness, contrast , directionality, line-
Tamura
likeness
Invariant
M1 , M 2 , M 3 , M 4 , M 5 , M 6 , M 7
Moments
normalization). A lot of first-order features can be computed
from it, such as grey-level mean, variance, consistency,
energy and entropy and so on. Histogram calculation is fast
and intuitive, but its use is often limited because it ignores
the correlations between pixels or their spatial relationships.
2) GLCM: GLCM is first presented by Haralick etal [2].
We can obtain the statistical information about the
distribution of pixel pairs through it. Firstly, a ‘direction’
and a ‘distance’ are defined to compute GLCM. Then pixels
pairs can be analyzed by this distance across the specified
direction. Next, the number of pixel pairs that have a certain
distribution of grey-level values is calculated.
3) GRLM: GRLM can discriminate the difference of the
image textures. The concept of ‘grey-level runs’ is first
proposed by Galloway [18] to calculate GRLM and it is a
set of consecutive, collinear pixels that have the same grey-
level value. Firstly, the directions of search and the number
of consecutive pixels for which to look should be defined.
Then in the pre-defined direction, the runs that have the
same grey-level value must be obtained to calculate GRLM.
4) GGCM: The gray-level of the pixel is the foundation
of an image and the gradient is the element of the image
edge. So Hong [5] proposes GGCM based on GLCM.
GGCM reflects the distribution rules and mutual relations
between the pixel gray-level and gradient, two most basic
elements of one image. It provides good description for
image texture. The elements of GGCM are defined to be the
number of the pixels having the same grey-level in the
normalized gray-level image and the gradient value in the
normalized gradient image. Then the probability of the pixel
values can be obtained to calculate the texture parameters.
5) Tamura: Based on the research about the visual
perception of human on the texture, Tamura [19] takes the
human subjective psychological measurement as the
standard and puts forward his representation way of texture
features. They have already been applied in many image
retrieval systems. Among them, coarseness, contrast and
directionality are most important.
6) Invariant Moment: Geometric moments are mainly
characterized by the geometrical characteristics of the image,
which has the invariance of translation, rotating and scaling
[20], so it is also called the invariant moments. In image
processing, invariant moments can be used as important
features to represent objects and classify the image. Hu [21]
proposed 7 invariant moments in his paper at 1962.
B. Texture Feature Selection
Features obtained using above methods are aggregated
for analysis. As the most commonly used method of
dimensionality reduction, feature selection can realize the
purpose of removing redundant features and irrelevant
features. So feature selection based on feature grouping and
sorting is proposed to reduce the feature dimension in this
paper.
1) Feature grouping: Feature grouping is to remove
redundant features using the redundancy between features as
the criterion. In this paper, we use the maximal information
compression index [22] as the criterion for measuring the
redundancy between two features. Let  be the covariance
matrix of two variables x and y , the maximal information
compression index can be defined as   x，y   smallest
eigenvalue of  , i.e.,
2  x , y   S x  S y  S  S y   4 S x S y 1   2  .
2
x (1)
where S x = var  x  , S y = var  y  ,  = cov  x, y  Sx S y .
The value of  is zero when the features are linearly
dependent and increases as the amount of dependency
decreases. It is sensitive to scaling and invariant to rotation
of the variables.
In this paper, the features are grouped in the feature
space according to the above criteria. Firstly, a certain value
of group numbers is set and then the method of hierarchical
clustering is used to integrate the features that have high
redundancy into the same group.
2) Feature sorting: Feature sorting is to remove noise
and irrelevant features using the classifying capacity of the
feature as the criterion. In this paper, we use the Fisher
criterion to select the efficient features.
Given a database with n samples belonging to C
classes w1 ,w2 , ,wC , the number of each class is ni , x ( k ) ,
mi ( k ) , m( k ) are sample x , the mean of the samples in ith
class and the mean of all samples in the kth dimension. Thus
the Fisher criterion value of the kth feature can be defined as:
J ( k )  S B ( k ) SW ( k ) . (2)
where S B ( k ) and SW ( k ) are the between-class scatter the
within-class scatter of the kth feature.
 under the guidance of clinical imaging specialists. For each
 mi ( k )  m ( k )  .
C
ni
SB(k )  
2
(3) kind of tumor, an image is choosen and the images before
i 1 n
1 C and after marked are shown in Fig. 2
    x ( k )  mi ( k )  .
2
SW ( k ) (4)
n i 1 xwi
J of the irrelevant and noise feature gets closer to zero
and increases as the classifying capacity increases.
In this paper, the features are sorted according to the
above criterion from high to low. Finally the feature of the
front rank is selected.
Through above two stages, features will be selected in
each group to constitute a new feature space. Redundant and
irrelevant features are removed to realize the purpose of
dimensionality reduction.
III. MATERIALS AND CLASSIFIERS

A. Data Sets
In this paper, texture database and real tumor data set are
chosen to test our proposed method. The following
subsections describe them respectively.
1) Brodatz texture database: Brodatz texture database
of the University of Queensland is the commonly used one
for image texture analysis. We choose 80 textures from the
database shown in Fig. 1, in which they are defined as D01,
D02,…, D80 from left to right, top to bottom. The original
image size is 640×640, cutting without overlapping is
carried out for each image in pre-processing to obtain 25
sub-images which size turns into 128×128. Thus a total of
2000 image samples constitute the sample space finally.
Figure 1. Brodatz texturedatabase.
2) Real tumor data set: 174 pieces of Magnetic
Resonance images (MRIs) of 58 patients with posterior
fossa tumors (31 medulloblastomas and 27 ependymomas)
confirmed by operation and pathology form this data set and
each patient corresponds to three images. Regions of interest
(ROI) of each image is manually segmented and marked
(a) Medulloblastoma (b) Ependymoma
Figure 2. The MRIs of two kinds of tumors before and after marked.
B. Multiple Classifiers
Our proposed method does not convolve with specific
classifiers. Therefore, we expect the texture features selected
have good performance on various types of classifiers. So
three widely used classifiers, namely k Nearest Neighbor
(kNN), Naive Bayes (NB) and Support Vector Machine
(SVM), are chosen to test the method. When it comes to
SVM, the LIBSVM package [23] which supports both 2-
class and multiclass classification is used.
IV. EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS
For these two data sets introduced above, we use three
different classifiers above to evaluate the performance of the
selected features in the numerical experiments. In this way,
we provide a comprehensive approach under different
conditions to test our method. All of the calculations in the
experiments of this paper are using MATLAB software
programming. The experimental condition is: Intel Xeon E5-
2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz/CPU 16 GB (DDR3
1866MHz)/Windows 7/MATLAB R2014a.
Cross validation is used in the experiments. Seventy
percent of the samples in each data set are randomly selected
as the training set and the remaining thirty percent as the test
set. Twenty times random sampling are implemented to be
experimented respectively.
We compared the performances of our method with the
feature selection method (FEFS) proposed by Luukka P [24].
Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 show the results of the Brodatz texture
database and the real tumor data set using the proposed
method and FEFS method by different classifiers.
 1 1 1

0 .9 0 .9 0 .9

0 .8 0 .8 0 .8

0 .7 0 .7 0 .7

accu racy
0 .6
accuracy

0 .6

accu racy
0 .6

0 .5 0 .5 0 .5

0 .4 0 .4 0 .4

0 .3
kNN 0 .3
NB
0 .3
SVM
0 .2 0 .2 0 .2
Pro p o s e d Pro p o s e d Pro p o s e d
0 .1 FEFS 0 .1 FEFS 0 .1 FEFS

10 20 30 40 10 20 30 40 10 20 30 40
feature number feature number feature number

(a) kNN classifier accuracy (b) NB classifier accuracy (c) SVM classifier accuracy

Figure 3. Comparison of classification accuracies of the Brodatz texture database using the proposed method and FEFS method.

0 .9 0 .9 0 .9

0 .8 5 0 .8 5 0 .8 5

0 .8 0 .8 0 .8

0 .7 5 0 .7 5 0 .7 5
accuracy

accuracy

0 .7 0 .7 accuracy 0 .7

0 .6 5 0 .6 5 0 .6 5

0 .6
kNN 0 .6
NB 0 .6
SVM
0 .5 5 Pro p o s e d 0 .5 5 Pro p o s e d 0 .5 5 Pro p o s e d
FEFS FEFS FEFS
0 .5 0 .5 0 .5
10 20 30 40 10 20 30 40 10 20 30 40
feature number feature number feature number

(a) kNN classifier accuracy (b) NB classifier accuracy (c) SVM classifier accuracy

Figure 4. Comparison of classification accuracies of the real tumor data set using the proposed method and FEFS method.

For the Brodatz texture database, the results in Fig.3
show that the proposed method can obtain very good
classification accuracies using only a small number of
features and features selected by the proposed method
consistently attain significantly higher accuracy rates than
those selected by the FEFS method when the number of the
selected features is less than 30. Only when the number of
the selected features nearly approaches to the original feature
number, their accuracies are close.
Figs. 4a, 4b and 4c show the results of the real tumor data
set. Similar to those of the texture database, when more than
10 features are used, the performance of two methods
becomes close. In summary, the experimental results show
that the proposed method is significantly better.
V. CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION
A method for texture analysis combined feature
extraction and selection is described in this paper. As a result,
the texture parameters we extract by different kinds of
texture analysis methods can be used to classify the images
and the proposed feature selection method based on grouped
sorting can realize the purpose of efficient feature selection.
The comprehensive experiments on both texture database
and the real data set by multiple types of classifiers
demonstrate that the classification accuracy can be
significantly good based on the proposed method.
When it comes to the criteria for feature grouping and
sorting, we choose the maximal information compression
index and Fisher criterion in this paper. In fact, many other
criteria can be used too. For example, when measuring the
redundancy between features each other, we can also use the
correlation coefficient, mutual information and entropy
between them; when measuring the dependency of class
information on features, the regression error can also be
considered to be used. Even we can also define some new
criteria in the future work.
In addition, there are more other TA methods existed so
the next phase of this research is to attempt to combine more
methods in-depth study on texture feature extraction. The
results of feature selection can provide important reference
for feature extraction. For some of the features that have
been removed in feature selection, we can consider that they
 should not be extracted and we only extract the effective
features in the future work. Therefore, another focus of the
work next step will focus on the related analysis of the
effective features selected and how they are involved to
influence and determine the classifying capacity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors thank the Magnetic Resonance Department,
the first Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University for
MRIs providing and marking. The work is supported by the
National Nature Science Foundation of China, grant
1304602.
REFERENCES
[1] Kassner A, Thornhill R E. Texture analysis: a review of neurologic
MR imaging applications.[J]. Ajnr American Journal of
Neuroradiology, 2010, 31(5):809-16.
[2] Haralick R M, Shanmugam K, Dinstein I H. Texture Features for
Image Classification[J]. Systems Man & Cybernetics IEEE
Transactions on, 1975, smc-3(6):610-621.
[3] Chen Q, Agu E. Exploring Statistical GLCM Texture Features for
Classifying Food Images[C]// International Conference on Healthcare
Informatics. IEEE, 2015:453-453.
[4] Padma A, Sukanesh R. Automatic Classification and Segmentation of
Brain Tumor in CT Images using Optimal Dominant Gray level Run
length Texture Features[J]. International Journal of Advanced
Computer Sciences & Applications, 2011, 2(10).
[5] Hong J. Gray level-gradient cooccurrence matrix texture analysis
method[J]. Acta Automatica Sinica, 1984, 10(1):22-25.
[6] Chen H, Xu W, Hao X. Detection of rail track surface defects based
on gray level-gradient co-occurrence matrix[J]. Beijing Jiaotong
Daxue Xuebao/journal of Beijing Jiaotong University, 2015, 39(2):7-
12.
[7] Ma Y F. Warp Weave Texture Feature Recognition Based on
Autocorrelation Function[J]. Advanced Materials Research, 2012,
468-471:1090-1093.
[8] Singh M, Malhi Y, Bhagwat S. Biomass estimation of mixed forest
landscape using a Fourier transform texture-based approach on very-
high-resolution optical satellite imagery.[J]. International Journal of
Remote Sensing, 2014, 35(9):3331-3349.
[9] Bashar M K, Matsumoto T, Ohnishi N. Wavelet transform-based
locally orderless images for texture segmentation[J]. Pattern
Recognition Letters, 2003, 24(15):2633-2650.
View publication stats
[10] Grigorescu S E, Petkov N, Kruizinga P. Comparison of texture
features based on Gabor filters[J]. IEEE Transactions on Image
Processing, 1999, 11(10):142-147.
[11] Cross G R, Jain A K. Markov random field texture models.[J]. IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence, 1983,
5(1):25-39.
[12] Huang X, Dong J, Wang M. Paper web defection segmentation using
Gauss-Markov random field texture features[C]// Image Analysis and
Signal Processing (IASP), 2011 International Conference on. IEEE,
2011:167-170.
[13] Mao B J, Jain A. Texture Classification and Segmentation Using
Multiresolution simultaneous Autoregressive Models[J]. Pattern
Recognition, 2015, 25(92):173-188.
[14] Voorhees H, Poggio T. Detecting textons and texture boundaries in
natural images[J]. Proc Iccv, 1987, 39(319):899-906.
[15] Peng H, Long F, Ding C. Feature Selection Based on Mutual
Information: Criteria of Max-Dependency, Max-Relevance, and Min-
Redundancy[J]. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis & Machine
Intelligence, 2005, 27(8):1226-38.
[16] James A P, Dimitrijev S. Ranked selection of nearest discriminating
features[J]. Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences,
2012, 2(1):1-14.
[17] Ashour M W, Khalid F, Halin A A, et al. Multi-Class Support Vector
Machines For Texture Classification Using Gray-Level Histogram
and Edge Detection Features[C]// International Conference on Recent
Innovations in Engineering and Technology. 2016.
[18] Galloway M M. Texture analysis using gray level run lengths[J].
Computer Graphics & Image Processing, 1975, 4(2):172-179.
[19] Tamura H, Mori S, Yamawaki T. Textural Features Corresponding to
Visual Perception[J]. IEEE Transactions on Systems Man &
Cybernetics, 1978, 8(6)(6):460-473.
[20] Zhao J, Yang B. Texture Image Classification Using Radon
Transform-Based Invariant Moments[J]. International Journal of
Advancements in Computing Technology, 2013, 5(7):1119-1127.
[21] Hu M K. Visual pattern recognition by moment invariants[J].
Information Theory Ire Transactions on, 1962, 8(2):179-187.
[22] Mitra P, Murthy C A, Pal S K. Unsupervised Feature Selection Using
Feature Similarity[J]. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis &
Machine Intelligence, 2002, 24(3):301-312.
[23] Hsu B C W, Lin C J. A comparison on methods for multi-class
support vector machines[J]. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks,
2002, 13(2):415 - 425.
[24] Luukka P. Feature selection using fuzzy entropy measures with
similarity classifier[J]. Expert Systems with Applications, 2011,
38(4):4600-4607.